


sing along, my friend, for it's our last refrain

by eynn



Series: i can't go back and lose it all [2]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, or the beginnings of one, so this is the clones' pov of their jedi falling, they finally have a family they can trust that isn't just themselves, they're so proud
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:01:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23074402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: The rumors spread slowly through Kamino. When we are ready to rise against our makers, General Ti will lead the charge.It isn't until the war's dragged on for years that Cody looks at the secret list of Trusted Jedi the clones keep one day and realizes that there is no Jedi Order, not anymore. Almost every single Jedi has Fallen.
Series: i can't go back and lose it all [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658362
Comments: 28
Kudos: 1246





	sing along, my friend, for it's our last refrain

The rumors spread slowly through Kamino.

 _General Ti can help you,_ they say. _General Ti once killed a longneck that was going to dispose of an entire batch. General Ti will sneak you through the training sims if you do your honest best. General Ti smuggles out the defective ones._

_General Ti is like a mother to us._

_General Ti can stop us from aging so quickly. She’s outwitted the longnecks and stolen their secrets._

_Don’t cross General Ti; her eyes shift to the color of fire and death and men fall before her without her laying a finger on them._

_We are all General Ti’s children. She keeps us safe._

_When we are ready to rise against our makers, she will lead the charge._

~

Commander Wolffe watches as General Koon goes from brother to brother, seemingly breathing life back into them by force of will.

He wonders how and why that kind of healing was taught by the jetii, and then knows, with a sick sense of certainty, that this is no jetii skill.

His General had Fallen.

How else would he be able to take the life from the dying soldiers they had been fighting and transfer it to them?

Whatever. He’s still their General Buir.

~

CC-2224, also known as Commander Cody, Marshal Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, has a headache.

The headache is called General Kenobi, who is currently looking at a pile of electrocuted droids with a very innocent expression.

Cody sighs. He unclips his General’s lightsaber from his belt, where it has been since he kriffing dropped it five minutes into the battle. “Here you go, sir.”

“Oh, thank you, Cody,” says General Kenobi, trying to give him a winning smile. “Strange how all these droids just shorted out, isn’t it? The Force must be with us today.”

“Yes, sir,” says Cody. He very pointedly does not look at the tiny sparks still crackling around the General’s fingertips.How the man thought he was fooling anyone into believing he wasn’t a Sith, Cody doesn’t know. He seems genuinely oblivious to it, though.

Well, their job is to follow their generals, and if this particular general now had the ability to fry droid hardware like a thundercloud in a playground of metal, so much the better. Their losses have gone down dramatically since It had happened.

Now if he can get his general calm enough for the yellow eyes to go back to their normal blue, they’ll all be just fine.

~

When they think back on it, it’s never really clear when they all made up their minds that General Tiin was on their slowly growing list of Jedi We Trust Because They Aren’t Those Di’kut Vod Kyramund That The Others Are.

What all the Jedi on that list have in common is – they aren’t Jedi at all. And they’ve proven over and over that they’ll go to any lengths to defend and save their men.

The clones love them for it, unashamedly and unreservedly. They’ll take any kind of sense of family they can get.

~

Commander Gree watches in awe as General Unduli defends them against the incoming wave of laser fire. She’s catching all the bolts.

Not some of them. All of them.

He’s never seen a Jedi move so fast or so accurately. He takes his eyes off her for a moment to put more pressure on his brother’s wound. They’re pinned down, injured to a man. General Unduli is the last one standing who can still fight with any kind of usefulness.

When he looks back at her, still feeling the blood trickling over his fingers from where they are buried in one of his brother’s shoulders, he sees a smile that is more of a snarl and her usually gentle eyes like smoldering coals. She moves like an ocean wave, like a desert wind. She is unstoppable, untiring, eternal. She could defend them forever. She will.

 _We are saved,_ is the only thought that crosses his mind.

~

Commander Ponds watches from a distance as the wreck of the ship convulses, shudders, and then collapses into a burning pile of scrap. The pirates who have captured him laugh. Admiral Kilian and the brother who had been navigating the ship are still unconscious, and he is the only one to witness it.

He laughs a few minutes later when a purple lightsaber slices through the first one’s chest.

General Windu cuts them down like grass, with such fury Ponds closes his eyes. He sees General Skywalker safe on the ground behind them, pale but breathing, and knows that somehow General Windu got them both out and got them here when it should have been impossible.

He opens his eyes when a gentle hand touches his forehead. General Windu is kneeling beside him, looking at him with such concern in those terrible burning eyes.

“Are you injured?”

Ponds shakes his head. “No, sir.”

General Windu breathes out a soft sigh. “Good. Come on, let’s get them somewhere safer.”

As Ponds stands up, he’s troubled. General Windu catches his arm, steadies him.

“I didn’t do this for myself,” he says, motioning to the bodies fallen around them. One escaped, but that’s fine. She won’t come back. “I did it for everyone else. The helpless and the innocent and the weak. I won’t hurt you, Ponds. I don’t want to hurt anyone except those who try to hurt us.” He pauses. “Can you keep this a secret, Commander?”  
Ponds nods. “Yes, sir.”

And he can.

But he does spread it slowly through the barracks. _General Windu is powerful. General Windu Fell for us. General Windu is on our side._

~

General Fisto never really shows any clear signs. Rumors pass around about him, though.

A trooper swears his eyes flashed yellow once while defending them under heavy fire. Another claims he saw the General electrocute a droid with his bare hands, and that’s . . . not exactly a Jedi thing, is it? Another says that once when they were trapped and alone their pursuers died mysteriously, and he didn’t get a good look but he thinks they choked to death? Another adds his own tale of golden eyes and unexpected powers, and soon the legend grows.

But he’s always gentle and kind and happy with the men, and has never hurt a jedi or a padawan, and so they forgive him any unusual behavior. It’s saving their lives, after all.

~

Captain Rex gently bangs his head against the wall and let out a heartfelt sigh. General Skywalker is interrogating a prisoner. On the whereabouts of his padawan, Commander Tano. Who has been taken by some of the prisoner’s men.

Rex glances through the window again to see the General with his hand outstretched and the prisoner lifted in the air, scrabbling at his own throat, his legs kicking. The General’s eyes are glowing malevolently.

He’s had suspicions his General had turned Sith for months, but until now, he hasn’t been able to confirm them. Still, wasn’t the General only using his Dark powers for good, backwards as the concept seemed? He was worried about Ahsoka. And the time he force-snapped an entire battlefield of droids in half, a bunch of their men had just been mowed down. And the time he exploded a pirate ship’s engines and let it crash, General Kenobi had just been hit. And the time they were –

Rex admits to himself that he has known General Skywalker was Sith for a long time now.

At least he doesn’t turn his admittedly terrifying temper on any of the Jedi?

~

Some of the talented ones, trained as slicers and infiltrators, write them a program they can use to chat to each other without anyone ever finding out. They use it sparingly, because there’s no sense in exposing their bits of freedom.

One of the things they use it for is to keep everyone updated on the list of Trusted Jedi.

One day, General Vos’ name shows up. The trooper who added it only says ‘I was dying. He brought me back like General Buir. He’s good.’

After more and more instances of General Vos randomly appearing, saving them in ones and tens and hundreds, and then vanishing again, he’s added permanently.

He’s a bit unpredictable to rely on, but they trust him to appear when he’s most needed.

It’s good enough.

Everyone needs a crazy uncle, don’t they?

~

General Unduli holds out until the reinforcements arrive, led by her soon-to-be-knighted Padawan Offee.

Commander Gree isn’t certain until he sees Offee tear into the droids that surround them, her lightsaber swirling in complicated attacks and lightning arcing from her free hand. He watches it leap from droid to droid and lets his head droop, lets himself focus on keeping his brothers alive and lets their Jedi handle keeping them safe.

He wonders why it took them so long to realize that they could win the war so much more easily without sticking to a code made for peacemakers.

~

Commander Bly isn’t sure when he first knew that General Secura was one of the Trusted.

He’s always at her side; she likes having him around. They know each other well. Sometimes he even dares to think the affection he has for her, far beyond that of fellow soldiers and brothers in arms, is returned.

He waits until one day, in battle, he clearly sees her eyes shift from their normal hazel to a bright, bright, sand-sulfur-yellow, shocking against her skin. Her speed increases, her attacks become more deadly. They win the skirmish they thought they were going to die in.

He updates the list and watches with pride as the confirmations from other troopers who know her flood in.

They Trust more Jedi now than they don’t, and the ones excluded are being watched.

~

Commander Jet gets lucky. He overhears General Mundi talking to himself, listens as he works through the morass of politics and betrayal and greed that surround Commander Tano’s sham of a trial.

He gets to watch his General Fall.

He agrees wholeheartedly, and feels a great sense of relief that now his General, too, is Trusted.

~

Commander Thire realizes his General can be trusted after a confusing conversation. Most conversations with General Yoda are confusing, but this one is full of ruminations and regret and hints that now the way the General deals with things will be changing.

He has orders now to not trust the Chancellor. That makes something deep in his brain shiver, but he forces it away. It’s logical to not trust the Chancellor. He has far too much power. He keeps letting more and more clones be made just to die.

He nods respectfully to his General and is surprised when a clawed hand gently pats his knee.

“With you, I am,” says General Yoda. “Callous too long, I have been. No more.”

“Thank you, sir,” says Thire, and goes to curl up in a dark corner and think about what that could mean for him, for his brothers under his command, for all his brothers.

It could mean that one day they have their freedom.

~

Commander Ahsoka snaps under the weight of the war, and all the brothers mourn for her. They know how she feels. They too are children thrown into someone else’s fight, and they also want out of it.

They grieve her loss together, and place their trust and hope in General Skywalker and General Kenobi and General Buir, in Knight Offee and in Captain Rex, in Senator Amidala. They’re her friends, the ones she loves.

If anyone can bring their sister-commander back to them, they can. And they’ll be waiting for her with open arms and hearts.

~

It isn’t until the war’s dragged on for years that Cody looks at the secret list of Trusted Jedi one day and realizes that there is no Jedi Order, not anymore. Almost every single Jedi has Fallen, and those that haven’t can be counted on his hands. A similar number have also Fallen, but into cruelty and madness instead of coming to their senses. Those ones are not Trusted.

He wonders if the Jedi know that they’re not alone, that all their brothers and sisters in the Order feel as they do.

He doubts it. The one thing they have all stubbornly clung to is their paranoia.

He wonders how to convince them to just talk to each other.

 _It’d take a miracle,_ he thinks, _or a disaster._

Then his comm beeps. When he answers, the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, the Commander-In-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, is speaking to him.

Cody internally sighs. Whatever this is, it can’t be good.

“Commander Cody,” the old man says. “Execute Order 66.”


End file.
